From fingerprinting to criminal sentencing, from lawyer licensing to judicial selection, and from eminent domain to wealth transfers via class-action lawsuits, how do perverse incentives impact the law and what reforms would create a more just and efficient legal system?

Independent Institute Research Fellow Edward Lopéz, Associate Professor of Law and Economics at San Jose State University and editor of the new Institute book The Pursuit of Justice, talks with Institute President David Theroux about the faulty incentives at the heart of government legal failures and whether market-based alternatives can provide viable solutions to the serious problems caused by the bureaucratization and politicization of the law.

Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs is interviewed by Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio on the widening gap between public and private sector pay, the increasing affluence of military towns compared with others, the disappearance of traditional checks on government power, and the predation and incremental ratchet effect of expanding governmental powers that increase temporarily during wartime but never really recede.

In June 2008 the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a landmark ruling on the Second Amendment individual right to keep and bear arms with its Heller v. District of Columbia decision. Two years later, in June 2010, a second historic decision squeezed through the highest court in the land.

Senior Fellow Robert Higgs talks about his book, Neither Liberty nor Safety: Fear, Ideology, and the Growth of Government, on The Holistic Survival Show with Jason Hartman. Higgs sheds light on the history of institutionalized violence implemented by a bloated federal state, caused by a misguided faith in larger government to ensure a freedom from fear. The Necessary and Proper Clause? People have been trying to loosen the bounds of the Constitution virtually from the time it was ratified to the present, Higgs cautions.